The casual effects of COVID-19 lockdown on air quality and short-term health impacts in China

The outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19) has forced China to lockdown many cities and restrict transportation, industrial, and social activities. This provides a great opportunity to look at the impacts of pandemic quarantine on air quality and premature death due to exposure to air pollution. In this study, we applied the difference-indifferences (DID) model to quantify the casual impacts of COVID-19 lockdown on air quality at 278 cities across China. A widely used exposure-response function was further utilized to estimate the short-term health impacts associated with changes in PM2.5 due to lockdown. Results show that lockdown has caused drastic reduction in air pollution level in terms of all criteria pollutants except ozone. On average, concentrations of PM2.5, PM10, NO2, SO2 and CO are estimated to drop by 14.3 mu g/m(3), 22.2 mu g/m(3), 17.7 mu g/m(3), 2.9 mu g/m(3), and 0.18 mg/m(3) as the result of lockdown. Cities with more confirmed cases of COVID-19 are related to stronger responses in air quality, despite that similar lockdown measures were implemented by the local governments. The improvement of air quality caused by COVID-19 lockdown in northern cities is found to be smaller than that of southern cities. Avoided premature death associated with PM2.5 exposures over the 278 cities was estimated to be 50.8 thousand. Our results re-emphasize the effectiveness of emission controls on air quality and associated health impacts. The high cost of lockdown, still high level of air pollution during lockdown and smaller effects in northern cities implies that source-specific mitigation policies are needed for continuous and sustainable reduction of air pollution.

Automated summary

The outbreak of COVID-19 in China led to lockdowns in many cities, resulting in significant reductions in air pollution levels, especially in terms of PM2.5, PM10, NO2, SO2, and CO. Despite similar lockdown measures, cities with more confirmed COVID-19 cases showed stronger improvements in air quality. The study also estimated a significant decrease in premature deaths associated with PM2.5 exposure due to the lockdown measures.